Tag Archives: chives

I just got back from a week-long trip for work and came back to find that the beans are putting out pods once more. The last round of beans I planted were pretty much a dud as I got not even a full handful of beans out of the crop. So far, this is looking to be my largest crop yet. The plants are packed in much closer than my first attempt at beans and there are flowers on everything. Some of the last round of beans decided to start flowering as well, so I will probably end up getting a some beans from that as well.

One double row and a partial single row of pinto beans. There is communal bee feeder at the very top of the picture.

The two latest plantings were both directly seeded into the ground in double- and single-rows. I am liking how this is turning out much better than my first plantings started in the greenhouse and I will probably be doing this for all but very earliest crops started before the chance of frost has completely passed. I think that I will be doing that from now on to try and get as much in before the high summer heat stops everything from producing fruit.

Flowering chives. I hope I can get some seeds off of this.

When my grandparents came to visit, they left me with a bunch of chives in addition to other plants and flowers. Regardless of what I get out of this plant, the flowers are quite beautiful. I think it was worth getting for just for that.

Once the summer heat wave broke and we were no longer dealing with highs of 115, the plants have sprung back quickly and the flowers are seem to be trying to make up for lost time. I’ve seen more growth in the past couple of weeks than I have in the rest of the time I’ve had them. It makes me hopeful that I’ll have some really nice flowers to show off next year.

The pecans are getting nice and big as the harvest starts getting closer.

After I finish with harvesting all the apples, the only tree harvest remaining will be the pecans. This will be the first pecan harvest I have here. I’ve had one other place that I have lived where there was a pecan tree, and that produced a freezer full of pecans from a single, giant tree. I don’t think that any of the trees I have will produce that much, but I do have four trees, so I might end up with more pecans.

A bunch of bees and one wasp on the communal feeder.

While I was gone on my business trip, my brother in law stopped by to build a communal hive feeder and to do inspections. This should make it quite a bit easier to provide large quantities of feed to the hives without a lot of work.

During the inspections, it looks like the blue hive has no eggs in it. This may be because the queen stopped laying, or because the queen died. I hope it is just the first. But to be safe, a frame of brood has been moved from one of the other hives so the bees are able to raise a new queen if the old queen died.